[kornakiewicz]

I do not know how it looks like in States, but in my home country (Poland) it's quite easy to buy rectified spirit (90%+ ) in a normal grocery store for cooking or so. But nobody uses it to produce vodka by mixing with tap water, expect teens 20 years ago.

Never seen it in Spain though and definitely not in Finland, when I live now and it's impossible to buy a wine after 8pm.

[microcolonel]

I guess it should come as no surprise that the birthplace of directly-marketed neutral grain spirits sells it to the public. Unfortunately it seems that it's illegal in many U.S. states, all of Norway. Here in Ontario I've heard they used to sell the equivalent through the LCBO (the monopoly state retailer of spirits, recently no longer the monopoly on wine and beer), but the product pages linked from forums talking about it are dead, and the manufacturer no longer lists it on their site. I hear Everclear (major American grain ethanol brand) can be bought in Alberta.

[umanwizard]

> nobody uses it to produce vodka by mixing with tap water

Why not?

[c-smile]

When you mix ethanol with water it gets heated up : https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d859/b2900e6d66cf71d79601dd...

Russian saying "The worst thing after drinking hot vodka is to have sex with sweaty woman".

Yet, it was Dmitry Mendeleev (inventor of Periodic Table of Element) who discovered that 40% mixture of ethanol and water is the best combination. It is quite hard to achieve precise mixture ratio by hand.

Yet in USSR you could buy pure drinkable spirit, here is a label of the bottle: http://incolorprint.ru/d/701905/d/1959_Спирт_Питьевой.jpg

Used in cases when volume matters.

[microcolonel]

> When you mix ethanol with water it gets heated up

I don't exactly know how to read this paper into real power-per-volume or temperature differential. Does a crude mixture produce an unsafe or inconvenient amount of heat? Does a mixture of chilled ethanol and water (not really part of this experiment) heat enough for the ethanol (or the water!) to evaporate?

> It is quite hard to achieve precise mixture ratio by hand.

Is there a place where measuring cups or at least five normal cups of similar volume to eachother are not commonly found in households?

[mrob]

>Yet, it was Dmitry Mendeleev (inventor of Periodic Table of Element) who discovered that 40% mixture of ethanol and water is the best combination

Wikipedia disagrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Mendeleev#Vodka_myth

[natecavanaugh]

> Russian saying "The worst thing after drinking hot vodka is to have sex with sweaty woman"

These are the worst things in Russian life? Call me a degenerate, but both seem still pretty pleasurable.

I mean, drinking the sweat of a sweaty woman and having sex with warm vodka are definite hard-no's in my book.

[m_mueller]

I love how even famous Russian scientists live up to the stereotypes.

[pandaman]

It's an often told story but I have not seen actual sources. Vodka had been made to "polugar" ("полугар",literally "half-burn") measure long before Mendeleev has been born. "Polugar" was a spirit, which could be burned down to half of the volume (when heated almost to boiling, of course) and it's about 38% ABV. More plausible theory is that when the better methods of measuring alcohol contents became available the standard had been set up to the "round" 40%.

[c-smile]

I wouldn't say it is a stereotype, it has practical reasons - 40% mixture is the max that body can consume right away. More than that and spirit stays in blood so it just enough to drink pure water next day and you are drunk again. Tried couple of times - not that pleasing effect.